07 | December | 2012 | rebornpipes

After reading about it online, I picked up a tenon expander from the Pipe Makers Emporium several years ago. It can be ordered online at http://www.pipemakers.org/tools02.html The website describes it as follows: Tenon Expander: (Three sizes-in-one: 1/25, 1/50, 1/60) “An absolute must for pipe repair! One tool that will do 99 percent of all loose tenons. Throw away that ice pick because this will do a much better job. Heat the Tenon with an alcohol lamp until it is soft. Insert the Expander to the next size. Place Tenon and Expander into cold water to set the Tenon to its new size. Remove the Expander and your Tenon will maintain its new size. .” The sell for $29.00 each

The concept of the tool is actually quite simple – heat the tenon with a heat gun/ hot water or heat the tenon expander tool with a flame or heat source. Once it is heated, push the expander into the tenon and twist it until the tenon expands. Cool the tenon under clean or cool water to set the expansion and then remove the tool. You will notice in the picture below that the tip is tapered and gets larger in diameter the farther you move up the tip toward the handle. By pushing the tool into the tenon you can expand it for a tighter fit in the shank. In my use of the tool I would heat and expand, then cool the tenon in water, remove the tool and try the stem on the pipe for a fit. If it needed more expansion I repeated the process until the fit was snug. The gradated slope on the tenon expander gives you a broad range of possibilities in accomplishing that task. After I had used it for a while I decided to evaluate the tool in terms of its positives and negatives. What about the tool did I like and what were its deficiencies?

The positives –

In thinking through the positives the obvious ones were those advertised on the PME website.

The ease of use is the first thing that stood out with the tenon expander. It is very simple to use even though it came with no instructions. It was not hard to figure out how to use it correctly.
The tapered end is also billed as a positive feature of at first glance as it works to open the tenon to varying degrees and you can repeat the fit until the stem is snug. I will explain in the negatives why I have come to believe that the tapered end is not as great a feature as it initially appears to be when you begin.
The grooves on the handle of the tool are cut to make it easy to hold on to as you work with it.

The negatives –

Over time and experience working with the tool I have found some of the features that I first thought were helpful have grown to irritate me and work as limitations of the tool.

The first thing I have learned is that the taper on the end of the expander, while being helpful, is also a negative feature. The expander does not expand the entire tenon but rather the end of the tenon. With use the tenon thus is no longer cylindrical but can flare at the end. The snug fit is thus only for the first 1/8 inch of the tenon. The rest of the tenon is not touching the walls of the mortise.
Heating the tenon to insert the expander makes the tenon very pliable and if you are not careful the tenon can be bent at an angle thus ruining the fit at the shank. I have found that if I heat the expander instead then the tenon does not soften as much and I avoid the potential of tilting the tenon.
A final negative for me is the handle of the expander. I use a pair of heat mitts to hold it as I heat it but if I were going to continue to use it regularly I would make a wooden handle and epoxy the expander into it. In my opinion it would make it more usable.

Other options: As I pushed the limitations of the tenon expander that I purchased I decided to look and see if I could find other tools that would address the negatives that I have spelled out above. I have been experimenting with various sizes of ice picks and awls to use for tenon expansion as they have a longer shank and less taper. This allows me to expand the tenon the entire length of the tenon rather than just the tip. So far they have worked very well. I can easily heat the shaft of the awl or ice pick while holding the wooden handle. They slide into the tenon and are easily twisted slowly to expand the tenon. The final verdict is still out on them as I continue to look for picks and awls with a variety of diameter shafts.

I picked this old pipe up in a lot of pipes that was given to me. The pipe is stamped LHS in a Diamond and next to that SEC on the left side of the shank. The right side of the shank is stamped US Patent 1908630 over Other Patent Applied For. I have hunted through the patent information site and could find the original LHS patent under the number above but the descriptions and diagram do not match the system in this pipe. The stem is Perspex I believe, and has the cross hatched metal end on it. That is threaded and connects to a threaded tenon that is connected to the bowl. When I got the pipe out of the box of pipes it was dirty and the rim had a lot of tar. The bowl was not badly caked but had remnants of tobacco left in it. The stem was dirty and opaque. The internal filtering system was black with tars. The stem also had some crazing in it – this happens when alcohol is used on Perspex stems.

I reamed and cleaned the bowl of the pipe and the rim and then scrubbed the exterior of the bowl with Murphy’s Oil Soap undiluted. I wanted to leave the original light finish without removing any of the stain so I carefully rubbed on the soap and wiped it off. The rim actually came clean very easily and the bowl was ready to go. I took apart the internal contraption and cleaned that with Isopropyl alcohol and also cleaned the shank with pipe cleaners, shank brush and Isopropyl. One the internals were clean I worked on the stem and cleaned it out with soapy water, pipe cleaners and cotton swabs. The finished pipe was then waxed with multiple coats of carnauba wax on my buffer and then polished with a soft flannel buff.

Anyone have any information on this pipe? It is an unusual piece of pipe history and I continue to hunt down information. Thanks for your help and thanks for looking.